Practice what we preach

I, like many of you, went to Ad:tech at Olympia this week and was surprised. Yes, I was pleasantly surprised that it was a lot busier than last year and really pretty up beat. Surprised too that there was a lot of emphasis on mobile, which until this year has tended to be something of a curio rather than part of the main event. But I was most surprised by the fact that, for a show about electronic marketing – taking in mobile and social networking – no one was actually using any of the tech available to get through to people on the show floor.

I was expecting Bluetooth shots from stands. I was looking for some SMS and MMS contact from exhibitors. I was hoping for some sort of in-show social network that took the meeting system idea to the next level. What I got was a trade show. With stands. Often empty stands. With some poor signage.

Now, to be fair I did learn a great deal from the on-floor seminars and I did meet some really interesting people and got some real insight in to social media marketing, where mobile marketing is heading and some great stats and stories. They even laid on the sponsored airship to cruise majestically about the hall. It was on this level a great show.

But for an advertising/marketing event, especially one that is aimed at the e and i sectors (e-commerce and i-whatever) the overall display from most of the exhibitors was awful. Stand after stand with nothing more than a pop up featuring way too many words. Many with no staff on them. Others that had no branding to speak of at all, just a few flyers (again, generally pretty poorly designed). Very few had any gimmicks.

I know times are tough and, as David Cameron and Nick Clegg make us all embrace dour economic realism there is no space for showyness and extravagance, I was really amazed to find that no one Bluetoothed me with a teaser, or used bump to give me their details, or had QR codes on their stands so that I could get some bumpf from them electronically.

No one was there collecting my data either apart from the organisers. Hats off to DMG and the Ad;tech team for getting their electronic badge scanner to work. I was mightly sceptical as I stood in the queue on arrival with my ‘badge’ on the screen of my iPhone waiting to scan it and get my proper badge, but lo, it worked a treat. I even used the e-badge on my phone for the data gathers at the door.

But that was it. Why weren’t any of the exhibitors actually using what they sell to not only demonstrate that it works, but to get those that are visiting from the ad industry and from the brands to buy into what the technology companies expect consumers to adopt?

While there was so much going on on the show floor and it was a really great show, the exhibitors let themselves down. I signed it with FourSquare when I arrived and got my Swarm badge as there were more than 50 other people logged in. I fired up Facebook places and saw quite a few familiar faces come up on that. But no one thought to leverage it at all.

And this isn’t just me whinging. A survey carried out by the MMA last week found that, across Europe, 25% of consumers want to have a mobile response channel to adverts in any medium – and if they had it, they would use it.

A quarter of consumers out there WANT to get in touch with you from your adverts using their mobile phones. Its doesn’t even have to be a QR code or anything fancy: an SMS shortcode is all they are looking for.

So with this in mind, it is doubly disappointing that the industry can’t even be bothered to use mobile cleverly to market to itself at its own event. What hope giving consumers what they want?

So I am going to do it. It’s time that we in this industry practiced what we preach. Trade shows are social gatherings of a finite number of people interested in the same thing – they are a social network. So Why don’t we treat it as such and harness all the powerful marketing opportunities social networks offer? Anyway, I am going to make this happen, so watch this space. Trade shows will never be the same again.